in the words of the great paula cole, where have all the regular, non-horrific pieces of MLB branded pride merch gone?
Not even a red orange yellow green blue indigo violet Coors Light OPEN sign in the window of the crowded little bar by the Pantages (which, in a somewhat troubling omen, turned off while we were inside, though it was midday and they were very much still serving) that we stumbled into sun sick after the parade could make June merry & bright. This Pride month arrived as all the world was inky dark beneath the long shadow of the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trial, or at least so the punishing social media fixation and agonizing discourse would have one believe, proceeded to include further painful instances of escalating hate and violence toward trans people, and ended with the decrepit Christian psychopaths on the US Supreme court taking steps to ensure that this country is as unsafe today for those who can become pregnant as in living memory. Meanwhile, the Dodgers are barely playing .500 ball and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season 12 has been boring so far.
In these recent weeks, the first gulps of summer, in this time for tank tops and good humor, I have felt horrors endured in my younger years return as a sick and inescapable film, like the sticky spring day pollen bath of a parked car, on the news, debates, and worst of all posts, of the day, haunting me around each corner and in every instance of half-dazed small talk. And, like, I’m fine. I have a safe home, a kind family, a number of group chats of closest friends to discuss important and mostly very unimportant things, a job I like okay and can take public transportation to, and a love I never thought to hope for, a love like a surprise sunbeam slicing through an atmosphere so long unchanged, reanimating my cells so that I’m not exactly the same person anymore, not quite, so that I’m someone a lot cornier, so that I don’t see the point in pretending otherwise now. I’m wonderfully, stupidly lucky for no reason at all and still shit is fucking fucked up and it’s not easy to be, just that, to float, and less easy to do it happy. But I try, and I often succeed for seconds or stretches. I try to be happy, and when that doesn’t work I try to buy stuff that will trick me into thinking I’m happy for a moment or two. Given that we live in the gory clinch of the final thrusts of a dying empire, damp and desperate, what consolation is left but to buy things? And I should think, being that I have gay sex and it’s June, I would to be able to buy some rainbow trinkets that aren’t totally vile to look at. But this, at least at the illustrious MLB Shop Dot Com Forward Slash Pride Collection, is not the case.
If, you know, let’s just say… hypothetically, of course… one where to build a time machine in the scant cement yard behind their apartment building next to the trash cans, which they then used to return to 2015 and, through a charming sequence of misadventures akin to something from a National Treasure film, stop the national, legal codifying of same sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, all in an effort to ensure that this piece of merchandise would never exist, could you really blame them? No gods no masters no birds no Mrses.
That being said I do find the idea of married lesbians who are rabid for the lowly Orioles quite charming and if anyone reading this should happen to meet that rather exacting descriptor please know that I would watch your reality show and/or the short-lived Paramount+ series based on it.
With all due respect, if I were walking down a hallway and passed a man wearing these, I would pull the fire alarm. Maybe I’m too tender from the misfortune of terry blend bermuda shorts having hit their peak of popularity during my vulnerable pubescent years, but I find these completely repulsive. They’re too long to let you to get the gams out to the people, and if you wore them to a baseball game (or basically anywhere) they’d immediately be disgusting. What’s the point?
These I don’t find so glaringly offensive, but they’re certainly not good. On the day of the official Pride Night game at Dodger Stadium, as I trudged up the hill to meet my friends, having been delayed on my bus journey from Hollywood by an alleged “fire incident”, details of which I was never and will never be able to ascertain, my girlfriend called to ask if I wanted, quote, “a gay Dodgers hat”, and, caught up as I was in the heat and excitement of being in line with not one but two separate men who were wearing the cropped Clueless t-shirt from the Abercrombie and Fitch 2022 Pride collection, I said yes, and then wore it all game and in the pictures we took and posted and I was happy that night, so happy still on the bus going west on Sunset toward home. I am not immune to rainbow capitalism. I am not a mind without sentimental desires, not made wholly of stronger stuff! I only must ask why all the schlock they’re shoveling has to be either egregiously ugly, like the shorts above, or, in the case of these shirts, like, barely legible.
The fact that there are “only 4 left” actually speaks volumes regarding the deleterious state of child rearing in the greater New York area and to be honest I feel afraid.
These I am not totally opposed to, at least conceptually, but as once notorious tomboy (i.e. all my dad’s cousins rightly thought I was gay for wearing boys zip off cargo shorts to every christening I was dragged to) and youth competitive swimmer, I have owned many a pair of plastic slides, and these do not pass the eye taste as far as quality goes. I just cannot imagine that they have the appropriate amount of tread to keep some stupid baby queer from accidentally skating over the wet tile on a pool deck and breaking their neck. I glance at these and I know some little homo who isn’t even particularly coordinated to begin with is going to lose an eye tripping on a tree branch and going face first into suburban underbrush while playing a neighborhood game of Manhunt with their best friend they’re in love with plus the kinda psychotic family of blond brothers from down the block who will all be in the army one day. And that blood will be on Major League Baseball’s hands. If they had these in an adult size I know I would have considered buying them to wear when I go to swim laps at the gym, and I would not have done it, because of internalized homophobia and because fifty dollars is a comically insane price point for this garbage.
Will concede that I did consider buying the Dodgers version of this one and filling it, specifically, with a picture I took of my girlfriend sprawled in our bed with allergy pills littered across her chest. That is, of course, not to say that I think this is a reasonable item to bring into your home, or even that it should have been manufactured in the first place, but only that I like my little jokes.
Baz Luhrmann is, I guess, not gay, but he’s not gay in the way where the ludicrousness of his apparent straightness in conjunction with his personal and professional aesthetic choices and, like, whole deal, generally, is so incongruent and odd as to be more other, more outside of the norm, more fascinating and funny and cool and weird than if he actually were sucking and fucking dudes all over the Outback, (as in the real place in Luhrmann’s country of origin, Australia, although sucking and fucking at The Outback Steakhouse is obviously chic.) and really the point is that he made The film of this cursed Pride, Elvis. In Elvis, a movie that is largely about Santa Claus, this guy who absolutely did kill, and also extremely fuck over, but, again, kill, Elvis says that actually, no, what killed Elvis was LOVE. The film, which is not very interested in Elvis Presley at all, vaguely posits that it’s the love of, like, “people going crazy when he thrusts on stage” that did him in, as opposed to the love of, say, banana peanut butter sandwiches, or drugs, although all three are good and I could understand why someone could get carried away on any. Regardless, when I kick off to the giant Del Taco in the sky or whatever I want everyone to know that it was LOVE that did me in as well, only for me it will be specifically the LOVE involved in this wretched sign.